PAGE 11 CIMARRON TRAIL MEMBER ARTICLE By T im & Per r i B l ake THE FINAL VERDICT…AND LESSONS LEARNED There was virtually no language barrier. Everyone we encountered spoke very good English and the road signage is easily read. There are many bicyclists, both in and out of towns and cities, which can be hard to see and unpredictable. (We had a couple of close calls!) The food was amazing everywhere we ate and some of the hotels we chose even had a breakfast included in the night’s stay. Their hospitality was better than most chain hotels in the U.S. Some mornings we were greeted with candles on the tables or even a fresh honeycomb from which to retrieve local honey for our selected breakfast breads. The only complaint we could say about the hotels, is how consistently hard the beds were, everywhere; very unlike our American hotels. They don’t have air-conditioning either so opening windows to get the fresh air at night was a lovely change to our summer routine. Using the GPS was a life-saver at times, and a royal pain at others. We would recommend getting the international phone service with your smart phone as it can provide an alternative routing option when the car’s GPS program just doesn’t work right. This did occur more than twice and using just plain common sense came in handy as well. We also purchased a Germany/Austria atlas before the trip just in case all our electronic gadgets didn’t work in our locations. However, we ended up never using it but it brought some peace of mind nonetheless. We had also figured out the longitude and latitude for many of the towns but the navigation within the Porsche PCM did not allow for numerical inputs for locations. That would have been handy. Luckily Apple Maps allows numerical navigation.
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